Marie Losier

Culled more from the realm of dreams than reality, inspired in equal parts by experimental film, silent cinema and outsider art, the films of French-born, (occasionally) New York-based artist Marie Losier have already earned praise from some of the most unique artists of the 21st century, many of whom have been her collaborators and subjects. "Marie Losier is the most effervescent and psychologically accurate portrait-artist working in film today," pips Guy Maddin, who collaborated with her on the short MANUELLE LABOR. "It’s like Fellini-meets-documentary," claims Genesis P-Orridge (subject of her ground-breaking work THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE), "a very new, radical way of making documentaries, and we think that what she does will be the template for the future." An online arts journal, however, is more direct: "Marie Losier," it states simply, "is a wizard of dreams." Born in 1972 in the prosaic realms of France, where her childhood was suitably colored by illicit viewings of her parent’s 16mm film screenings, Losier fled for the magical land of New York City as an adult, where a stab at studying art was soon overshadowed by a position with avant-garde theater legend Richard Foreman (later the subject of another piece, 2005’s THE ONTOLOGICAL COWBOY). "It was my job," she recalls, "to make the giant penises." Underground film collectives further inspired her, while classes with cult filmmaker Mike Kuchar soon gave her the skills to create her own work, pieces that are simultaneously naïve and warped, emboldened by the "anything goes" freedom of experimental cinema yet enriched by the dreamlike beauty of early silent cinema (and as refreshingly playful with gender constructs as they are with genre constructs). Portraits of her heroes and mentors, music videos and strange narratives, all enlivened by homemade costumes and sets that would make Dali proud: each bubble forth like a child’s homemade vision of what cinema is supposed to be, a realm where fiction and reality, male and female, fantasy and documentary are one. "I feel that they [reality and fiction] mix," Losier noted in an interview with a Journal of Performance and Art (PAJ), "and I don’t really care that they do, because that’s the world where I’m comfortable." - Jason Sanders